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Well, Amazon finally hooked me. I've been spending a ton of money on Prime stuff, and they've been waving an "Amazon Prime Rewards Card" with a $70 signup bonus in front of me, and I finally pulled the trigger. And spent my $70 bonus on a Raspberry Pi 3 (with accessories). I'll be assembling the son of a bitch this weekend.

I went with this case. According to the comments, with some copper foil + thermal paste + a bit of sandpaper (I have all of these things) I can turn the whole thing into a giant heatsink and avoid having to install any fans!

You'll have to let me know how this goes. I really wanted a classic NES and the Super when that comes out, but if I can not have to stalk stores to get one and just build this over the weekend, it's pretty tempting.

Step 3: snip off some pieces of copper (1 mm thick as recommended by a reviewer on Amazon). Realize immediately that wire cutters aren't going to get the job done, and drive to Home Depot to buy tin snips instead.

Step 4: glue the bits of copper to the hot parts of the board with thermal paste. Realize immediately that you won't be able to shut the case around this sandwiched monstrosity of 1-mm-thick metal scraps without cracking something important. Peel the copper back off and just live with thermal paste alone. Grumble about wasted trip to Home Depot, but who doesn't need tin snips once in a while? Assemble.

Step 5: before you power anything up, connect the micro SD card to your computer. Format it (FAT32), then download and install the RetroPie ISO.

Step 6: connect a USB keyboard, a USB controller, and a monitor/TV, and start the thing up. Configure your controller, then connect to your WiFi. Then... if you're comfortable with the command line, you may want to do some configuration at this point. Hit "F4" on the keyboard to get to a bash prompt, and start typing. Here's what I did:

First, get your IP address (type "ifconfig" and if you're behind a router, just look for an internal IP, something starting with 192.168.x.x). This will come in handy later.

Now just "sudo reboot" and remember you can get back to the beautiful command line any time by hitting F4, and subsequently restart the RetroPie GUI with the command "emulationstation."

Step 7: get some game ROMs. Probably the easiest way to transfer them onto the system (now that the micro SD card is installed) is with something like WinSCP. I connected to the IP from above, with the username "pi" and the password "raspberry," and copied stuff over WiFi. Games go into the directory /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<nes,snes,etc.>

The ROMs may all need to be unzipped. I did that on the command line:

cd ~/RetroPie/roms/nes
unzip "*.zip"
rm -f *.zip

cd ~/RetroPie/roms/snes
...

Step 8: now you're basically done, so this is optional. If you want thumbnails and descriptions for your game library, you can use the "scraper" tool built into RetroPie (hit "start" on the controller for the main menu, go to "scraper"). It's slow and inaccurate, though. So I'm using this other scraper somebody wrote, from the command line (again):

Run that last command in each console's subdirectory. This part still takes a long time, so far it seems like each game takes ~1 minute to finish processing. But eventually, my RetroPie experience will be even cooler. Thumbnails!

Final Step: play da games. This UI is seriously slick, I love RetroPie so far. And the emulation is smooth and accurate. Thumbs way up!

Had a sick kid and wanted to play around more with Raspberry Pi's so I bought another one and made my own RetroPie. I got a hell of a list of ROM's from a buddy and it's currently scraping the titles for the thumbnails. Not too hard, but I'm an idiot who took 30 minutes to realize he was typing "Sudu" instead of "Sudo", which was a bit of a problem.

I saw the SNES Classic in stock on gamestop.com and my resolve wilted. I bought one. I have a Raspberry Pi, but I feel like I need a SNES Classic before they're out of stock forever. Now there's news about the NES Classic being restocked soon, and both will be available "through the end of the year," so my limited-time-hurry-up brain is working overdrive. $79.99 plus tax, plus $9.99 shipping. I spent almost a hundred bucks on this damn thing. Oh well, at least I didn't spring for a scalper's fee.

It's been in stock at Target most of the time lately. I don't think I have the Star Fox 2 on my Pi, but I probably could if I looked at all. It's a bit more complicated to save on the Pi than the classic is I imagine, but I haven't played one to know for sure.